Curator of Galleries and Exhibitions for Ringling College of Art and Design, Mark Ormond, has brought the exhibition together to celebrate Dean’s curatorial expertise. According to Ormond, "This exhibition will be a tribute to Kevin Dean's "eye" as a discriminating curator. It will also help the visitor understand the process of organizing exhibitions. The range of media displayed should provide the viewer with a visual panoply that will transport them to places both familiar and new."

Works are on loan courtesy of the artists and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; George Adams Gallery, NY; and Ronald Feldman Gallery, NY.

Selby Gallery II: Gabriele Münter Paintings

ABOVE: Gabriele Münter, Kind mitt Puppe, (Child with Doll), 1912

Selby Gallery II, Gabriele Münter Paintings: Five paintings by German artist Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter from the collection of Ronald and Harold Kendall will be on view: Still Life, Adventstrauss, Brown Cows, Kind Mit Puppd and Sudliche Bucht. Best known as one of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter group, Münter overcame early prejudice towards women art students to establish her career alongside other major artists of her time—Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee. She ceased to paint for a while in the 1920’s, but resumed in secret in the 30s as the Nazis considered work by members of the Blue Rider group to be “degenerate.” Miraculously, her paintings and works by fellow artists that she had hidden survived. Münter's work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Lenbach House, Munich, Germany; The Jewish Museum, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain; and Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey—to name a few.

[GABRIELE MÜNTER] Gabriele Münter was born in 1877 in Berlin; her father died when she was nine and her mother when she was twenty. She began her art studies in 1897 at Dusseldorf in the Ladies Art School because women students were not then admitted to the established art academies. From 1898 to 1901, she traveled in the United States, and then resumed her studies in Germany in 1901. She soon became dissatisfied with traditional teaching and enrolled as one of the first students at Kandinsky"s Phalanx School.

From the time of their meeting, Kandinsky was impressed by her talent, declaring that he had nothing to teach her, that she was a "natural" artist. The two traveled across Europe from 1903 to 1908, including a two-year stay in France. They lived at Sevres, near Paris, where they were much impressed by the new style of bold color and simple forms evolving there in the work of the Fauves group. During those years, 1906 and 1907, Münter exhibited her work in Paris at both the Salon des Independants and the Salon d'Automne. On their return to Germany, Münter and Kandinsky settled near Munich in the village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps. Her painting, as well as that of the other founders of the Blaue Reiter group in 1911, Kandinsky, Von Werefldn, Klee, Marc and Jawlensw, is characterized by broad, flat areas of color, intense and expressive color contrasts; emphatic, bold and simple designs and extreme expressionistic effects.

Kandinsky, though married, pressed Münter for a romance and by the summer of 1903 they were secretly engaged, pending his divorce. Fourteen years later, Munter was still waiting for him to fulfill his commitment when he abandoned her to marry another woman. He stopped writing to her from Russia, ignoring her efforts to contact him, and she learned secondhand of his marriage. She suffered from the whole thing bitterly.

Münter left Murnau in 1917 and returned a decade later; by the 1930s she was once more painting actively. She had to do so clandestinely during the Nazi era, as her work, along with most other progressive German modern art, was declared "degenerate" under the Third Reich. In 1931 Münter moved back into the Murnau house with Johannes Eichner, a physician, and she preserved the house almost exactly as she and Kandinsky had left it. After World War Il she worked to promote the reputation and history of Der Blaue Reiter group during its early years in Munich. She died in 1962.

[SPECIAL EVENTS]

Friday, Feb. 27, 5:00 - 7:00 pm: Free public opening reception

Monday, March 2, 11:30 am: Director’s Tour

[SPONSORS]

Sponsored in part by Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Revenues; and WSMR Classical 89.1.

[CONTACT US FOR MORE INFORMATION]

Phone: 941.359.7563 or 941.351.5100

Email: tjaeger@ringling.edu

Web: www.ringling.edu/selbygallery

[LOCATION] The Ringling College of Art and Design campus entrance is at 2700 N. Tamiami Trail on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Sarasota. There are several parking lots on the southside of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Way and throughout the campus.

[RINGLING COLLEGE GALLERIES] All gallery exhibitions and presentations (and most of our special events) are free and open to the public.